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Home>> Mesothelioma Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy is the use of anti-cancer drugs to destroy or shrink cancer cells. The drugs work by disrupting the growth of the cancer cells. Chemotherapy sometimes works and controls the malignant growth of mesothelioma. Chemotherapy helps to increase the survival rate for few more years, but it does not cure properly and cannot save patient life. It just provides symptomatic treatment to the patient.

Those Mesothelioma patients undergone through surgery also require chemotherapy treatments. The effectiveness of chemotherapy in treating mesothelioma is still being researched. Today medical technology has attained a good position and many good combinations of chemotherapy drugs are available in the market, but still these drugs cannot save patients life but give relieve from symptoms and increase patients survival rate. These combinations are known as chemotherapy regimens.

Types of Chemotherapy:

Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy: It is used to shrink a tumor before surgery or radiation therapy

Adjuvant chemotherapy: It is used after surgery or radiation therapy to destroy remaining cancer cells

Systemic chemotherapy: Anticancer drugs are used to destroy cancer cells throughout the body as opposed to localized area. The drugs circulate through the bloodstream after being administered orally, intravenously, or injected into a muscle.

Intraperitoneal chemotherapy: It involves the direct injection of anticancer drugs into the abdominal cavity using a thin tube.

Intracavity chemotherapy: Anticancer drugs are directly injected into the chest or abdominal cavity, where they can be administered at higher doses without causing the toxic effects they would if administered systemically through the bloodstream. The chemotherapy is then given to increase its ability to kill cancer cells.

Chemotherapy Drugs: Effective drugs in the treatment of mesothelioma are: Pemetrexed, Cisplatin, Carboplatin, Mitomycin C, Vinorelbine , Raltitrexed , Doxorubicin and Gemcitabine.

Side effects of Chemotherapy Drugs: Chemotherapy Drugs usually kill malignant cells but it also kills the normal cells of the body. These cells destroy the bone marrow thus reduces the blood count level in the body and generates lot of symptoms in the body.

Symptoms:

-Fatigue and Shortness of breath

-Bruising and Bleeding

-Nausea and vomiting

-Mouth sores

-Increased risk of infections

-Loss of appetite and

-Hair loss